Election Day has been the biggest news event of the past three years with Americans visiting News and Media websites in droves and in particular websites of 24-hour cable news networks. Visits to News and Media Web sites reached their highest level of the past three years on November 4th, accounting for 6.6% of all US Internet visits. Visits to News and Media websites were 40% higher than the average for the month of October.
Web sites for 24 hour cable news networks, CNN.com, MSNBC and Fox News were the biggest beneficiaries of visits each seeing traffic more than double on November 4th compared to the average for October. CNN in particular was the biggest beneficiary, with visits up 190%.

By comparison, visits to Print media websites were up only 10% and in fact, Broadcast media website visits overtook Print media website visits for the first time. This tells me that print media brands are still saddled with a legacy of being viewed as static publications. Newspapers have been trying to reinvent themselves but when a story is developing and changing in real time, consumers continue to turn to the 24-hour news networks.
In a few minutes, I will post a second entry on this theme – this time looking at search data for the election showing that News and Media companies are missing out on search engine traffic by not optimizing to event based terms.